Commit!

Who is Connor Willumsen? Before and while drawing his Punisher story, Willumsen made career moves unusual for genre cartoonists. He took Frank Santoro’s correspondence course, and Santoro later praised the above page from Punisher Max for retaining a powerful page center “by breaking up the grid at the bottom tier.” Willumsen also served as the 2012-13 Center for Cartoon Studies Fellow, and told James Sturm that his initial goals for his Fellowship year were modest: “I wanted to facilitate a situation where my obligations were as aimless as they ever had been, cultivate a patient boredom, and see what materialized in the vacuum.” For Willumsen, finding his aesthetic way via “patient boredom” helped him grow beyond the idea of a conventional career, into a purpose “that has no obvious practical merit,” the creation of new images of “worth” for readers hungry for new ways of seeing. Willumsen reminds me of David Mazzucchelli: both quickly mastered genre comics, and then just as quickly left behind mainstream publishers in search of Meaning and Art.